Collage-making as a chance for educational research with health professionals

The contribution aims at providing a reflection on the use of “collage practice” in educational research involving health professionals. The paper seeks to explore the use of collage as an investigation strategy in connection to narratives, referred to an arts-informed perspective in qualitative research. Using images can allow a new comprehension of the world, based on imaginative functions. Similarly, narratives are a paradigmatic way for creating comprehension of the world, using metaphors. For this reason, the use of collage can be a valid research instrument especially when participants involved are adult professionals, in order to break the “fixed versions” of their stories, built during their lifetimes and working experience: the collage will be an instrument to introduce something unexpected that allows them to re-think their stories, producing different narrations. The paper will discuss the collage technique, proposed as an instrument that can help participants to go deeper into the process of meaning construction, before, after or beyond narrations related to lived experiences, as usually done in narrative inquiry, and biographical research. With particular reference to health contexts, collage, accompanied by narration, can be an instrument to allow professionals to reflect and give meaning to their everyday complex practice with patients. In order to clarify this issue, different examples of qualitative research, carried out by the authors in health contexts will be presented and discussed. The search for visual and imaginative metaphors based on images and verbal narrations can create forms of meaning about everyone’s experience, which otherwise would not be discovered.